ChatGPT

Note: I promise, nothing in this post is generated by ChatGPT.

Mental calculation and calculator 

I grew up in an East Asian culture that values learning mental calculation. I remember how adults think of calculators, and what children were being told to practice at Kumon

I can’t do mental calculations, and I still admire those who do. They, however, don’t seem to always end up getting STEM degrees or doing better in personal finance.

I reach for a calculator on my phone, watch, and Alfred every day.

Writing and input methods

I also grew up in a place that appreciates penmanship.

Yet, I can’t seem to write Chinese characters because of my inability to remember the strokes of the characters. Since leaving school, I have been almost exclusively relying on typing characters on screens. Thankfully, East Asian input methods are ubiquitous on all devices — handwriting recognition, in fact, came later.

Writing and ChatGPT 

Essay writing is also an appreciated skill. It is arguably global, not limited to East Asia.

Users of the language model can generate essays with the right prompts, and supplement them with their edits.

There are no undisputed results with a given calculation or character. 16 times 4 is always 64. The same goes for typing Chinese characters — the outputs are the same CJK code points in Unicode. One of course one has to understand the math enough to put in the right calculation, or with enough reading skills to pick the right character among the homophones.

It is also a learned skill to give ChatGPT the right prompt and supplement the output with the right edits. We, humans, are only a few months into understanding what it feels like to learn a such skill. But even with users who excelled at that skill, the output isn’t indisputable. The vast space of possible human utterance and expression means that there will be bad and effortless ChatGPT-generated essays, and there will be essays made better because of ChatGPT.

What would that lead us, you ask?

ChatGPT and half-lies

As of today, the output of a ChatGPT-assisted essay still relies on heavily on a human to fact-check. The language model does not employ the same editorial standards as Wikipedia, let alone academic papers. It does not know if the materials it was trained on were trustworthy either.

Like CoPilot, the copyright of the generated content is a subject of scrutiny too. Just last week, I had to reject a pull request at work, because it contains a function generated by ChatGPT without copyright notation.

What if it is by design, not a problem?

ChatGPT and half-truth

We may be witnessing the end of the human-driven internet, where the majority of the texts are written by humans.

We have already seen the shift where almost all contents are now curated by algorithm, with many machine learning models. There are tons of reflections on the effects of that (among the almost-destruction of democracies) not worth repeating.

User-generated content may soon be drowned by machine-generated content. Perspectives will soon be replaced by entities with the biggest wallets. Intelligence and misinformation campaigns will be even effortless.

On the other hand, the next great fantasy literature may be generated than written. Its fictional universe can be as glamorous as that of Asimov.

In conclusion

It is a paradigm shift. Just like how calculators and input methods relieve the mental burden of many, ChatGPT is going to change how humans construct essays, and even the thoughts themselves.

I am looking forward to seeing what kind of creativity ChatGPT will unleash on humanity, while carefully observing the harm it may cause.

I will miss the days when life was simpler, and you don’t have to worry about the quality of the texts you encounter on the web, at least this much.

I hope future generations will continue to be able to enjoy the ability to reflect on their thoughts through their writings, like what I am doing with my blog right now.


This post is a reprise of what Evan Puschak said in his The Nerdwriter video, also a toot from ronnywang, together with my take on the subject. Any mistakes are mine and mine alone.

Leaving Mozilla

Last week, I ended my journey at Mozilla. The decision to leave was bittersweet, but I felt it was the right time for me to try something new instead.

I am sincerely grateful to everyone who took their chances on me. I am thankful for the lemons too — you can’t make lemonade without them!

During my time at Mozilla, I worked on now-defunct Firefox OS as an engineer and later manager. I helped built the short-lived “Taipei Development Center” as well. It was quite a ride. Last year, as an individual contributor, I spent a large chunk of my time moving web content UIs to a Shadow DOM-based widget architecture, which shipped last week in Firefox 65.

I would like to share this paragraph from my goodbye letter to my colleagues here:

The internet has an impact on humanity akin to the printing press. For better or worse, we are in a place in time where we are empowered to shape the future for the next 500 years, just like what the printing press had done for the last 500 years. May we all find our ways to tame the beast.


I am joining Apple to work on MapKit JS. Looking at how modern web applications are built is a great opportunity to reflect my experience building a browser. I am looking forward to find out what I can contribute.

Programming 101: Learn English

@muanchiou shared this wonderful talk on Twitter. The talk mentioned a lot of things I have tired of organizing them into words, because of the things I mentioned on Twitter:

Thank you very much for sharing this. It’s a sad reality but it’s a reality need to be told. I’ve find it hard to talk about this without people from both sides getting defensive so I stopped talking. Maybe I should — start by sharing this.

If you work with non-native English speakers or online/technical communities at any capacity, I highly recommend watching this 15 minutes talk.